Bede in the Galilee Chapel, and the Prince-Bishops

Bede spent his life in the twin monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow, a few miles away, and finished his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 731. It is the foundation of everything known about the conversion of England, and it did something else besides: Bede used years counted from the incarnation as his framework, and the popularity of the book is the main reason that convention spread through western Europe. His technical works on the reckoning of time were the standard treatment of the Easter calculation for centuries, and the dispute about the date of Easter between the Roman and Irish traditions is one of the set pieces of his history. His bones were brought to Durham in the eleventh century and lie in the Galilee Chapel at the west end of the cathedral.

Durham's bishops were not ordinary bishops. Holding a frontier against Scotland, they were granted powers that elsewhere belonged to the crown: their own courts and justices, the right to mint coin, to raise an army and to create barons, so that the county was a palatinate and the bishop's authority within it was described as a kingdom beside a kingdom. Those powers were finally removed by statute in 1836, and the bishop and chapter used part of the released endowment to found a university in the castle, the third in England.

A cathedral, a shrine, a scholar's grave and a temporal jurisdiction on one rock is the reason the place looks the way it does.